Thursday, October 01, 2009

I want a new mouse

I've tried a couple of mouses at work—an off-brand and one from Microsoft—both cheap, corded, optical, and with a scroll wheel. Every so often, the mouse cursor/pointer jerks to a corner of the screen. This happens with both of them. I've gone through Dell's online troubleshooting process, but to no avail. I'm thinking the cause may be their lowly LED-based sensors on my fake-wood laminate desk. Laser should be better, right, or anything that doesn't need to look at my desk surface? While I'm replacing it, I might as well consider the ergonomics, too. My mouse wrist—the right one—hasn't hurt but, you know, now that I think about it, well, maybe it does hurt just a bit. :-) Actually my left wrist hurts more. What's up with that?

The Logitech Cordless Optical TrackMan looks nice, although I've never used a trackball for any length of time.

3M has an interesting alternative—a joystick. Hmmm, I dunno, though...

I think I'll get one of these touchpads just for fun. I don't mind using the touchpad on my Eee PC. Might be nice to switch back and forth between a mouse and a touchpad during the day.

The HandshoeMouse looks like a ray (you know, the fish). Nice, but it's not a laser.

Here's Microsoft's Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000. Not bad. I've had trouble with their scroll wheels in the past, though.

Finally, Logitech's MX 1100 looks real nice. Good reviews, too. I've used their MX Revolution at home for several years and really like it.

UPDATE 12/3/2009: I ended up buying a like-new Logitech MX1100 off of eBay for $20. I like it, although I have been accidentally clicking what are normally the Back and Document Flip ("stealth") buttons with my thumb. After recently losing some text I had just written by accidentally clicking the Back button, I finally got around to disabling these and the Forward button. I never use the Mouse Sensitivity buttons, but they're out of the way so I'll leave them alone. The button below the scroll wheel that switches between scroll speeds works fine, although I miss the automatic clutch in the more expensive MX Revolution. My biggest gripe is with scrolling in click-to-click mode. When you scroll in one direction and then stop, the wheel often rolls back to the previous notch, which moves the mouse back a bit in the opposite direction, which of course scrolls whatever you're looking at back past where you wanted to stop. Just a minor irritation, though. Overall, I like this mouse.